Nutrition and food

The thirtieth entry is la dimensione della porzione, and the noun inside it is the kind of false friend that never announces itself, because the two words are spelt almost alike. La dimensione is the ordinary Italian word for how big a thing is, and it works perfectly well in the singular. Le dimensioni della stanza are the size of the room; un pacco di grandi dimensioni is a large parcel; che dimensioni ha is what a shop assistant asks when she means how big is it. English took the same Latin noun and kept only half of that. Our plural « dimensions » does still mean measurements, and a drawing carries them; but the singular « dimension » has gone abstract on us. It is a direction in space, or a facet of a problem — « a new dimension to the argument » — and it cannot be set in front of a portion. « The dimension of the portion » is not English. What is written on a packet here is « portion size », two plain words with nothing Latin in them. So read dimensione as size, write size as dimensione, and let « dimension » keep the abstract work it has taken on.